2006 May | Virtual China

Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Chinese blogposts becoming blogbooks

Published

on May 31, 2006

. 2 Comments

Bookcover_01

John Kennedy at GlobalVoices has a wonderful translation of numerous Chinese blog posts about the latest media twist in the Chinese blogosphere: big name bloggers publishing books of blog posts. Wish we knew more about who was reading them…people who can’t easily access the Internet? Who would like to have more time online but don’t? And of course, those who love the blog to begin with. Here’s a commentary on the phenomenon by Blogger ZKT219:

Since spring this year we’ve seen an upsurge in famous bloggers publishing books. Xu Jinglei’s Old Xu’s Blog printed a hundred thousand copies. Soon after came Soho China president Pan Shiyi’s blogbook Pan Shiyi’s Blog. Wenhui Publishing House is working on Zheng Yuanjie’s blogbook Zheng Yuanjie, Sudden Blogger, and Lifeweek editor Wang Xiaofeng’s collection of blog commentary You May Not Associate: A Boring Person and His Boring Blog. [Note: book cover above, and also note that "Associate" does not mean "get together with" but rather "make links in one's mind"]

…publishing blogbooks seems a little excessive….the publishing of blogbooks naturally has its limits. No matter what,
they’ll always only be records of things gone past and will never be
able to keep up with the internet.

But many disagree, as this excerpt from blogger Tom Jian shows:

You May Not Associate proves there remains a reason for the
continued existance of white paper and black letters. First I wondered,
what’s the point of making a book out of things already written on a
blog? Isn’t this the age of looking at pictures and watching screens?
And this was all online stuff to begin with. Yet reading those words
after having been put on paper, they really do have flavor.

trying to find the World Cup live in virtual China

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on May 31, 2006

in Sports, Television, Video Clips and Virtual China

. 7 Comments

Click_here_2 Update 6/11: try this. Go to SMGBB’s World Cup Live site and click on the yellow button that looks like this, which is found in the middle of the Live Channel screen.

Mysee_2 It will provide you with a link to the software that will allow you to see the games live, which is provided by Mysee. Click on the blue button. I can’t download it since I have an Apple computer and it’s only available for PCs. So it’s up to you…but give it a try and let us know if it works!

[original post, 5/31] As tech-savvy football/soccer fans from around the world know, you can find some sporting events broadcast online via downloadable P2P apps (previously blogged here). Here’s a first attempt to figure out how this will work for the 2006 World Cup. Will official Chinese sites show video highlights only? Will others be watching real-time live feeds broadcast peer to peer? For their part, FIFA and Yahoo are offering free online video highlights
available within the hour following the final whistle of each game
(NOTE: except Asia and Middle East, where a 24-hour delay is in place). There will clearly be a demand during that 24 delay, and it will clearly be met.

Sohu.com and SMGBB.cn, a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Group, have
partnered to provide the online 2006 FIFA World Cup for tens of
millions of Chinese viewers, if not more. Sohu is also the exclusive online media provider of the Beijing 2008
Olympics (talk about a good place to be), and the 2006 World Cup can be
seen as an early dry-run.

Sohu has its so-called "direct feed" schedule here. Probably available here, on Sohu’s 2006 World Cup homepage. Meanwhile, SMGBB.cn has its own World Cup page, where you can clearly see the "Live Channel" screen where streams/highlights might be coming. It requires the latest Internet Explorer upgrade. SMGBB also has this page which seems even more promising but which also requires you to register. I’m still trying…

By the way, as a measure of how important the World Cup broadcast is in China, 7 out of 10 Chinese report plans to watch it, and it has even been the site of a major, if bizarre, political protest. During the last 2002 World Cup TV broadcasts in China, the SINOSAT satellite feed was hijacked on and off for ten different stations across China over a period of a week. It sounds like something off of Lost–screens flickering, blurry images of Falun Gong literature appearing…Read more here.

From Sohu’s site, this press release:

http://2006.sohu.com/smgbb [will deliver] real-time video highlights
and tournament photos directly to football fans in China. The channel
will feature exclusive World Cup 2006 content including event
highlights, select clips, behind the scene footage in all the 64
tournaments and comprehensive reports - all readily available online
through rich media formats.

心理 - Psychology Express on Super Girl

Published

Jason Li

on May 31, 2006

in Blogs

. 0 Comments

心理 Psychology Express is a blog for psychology enthusiasts. Posts involve new psychological findings, which are usually socially relevant. Some are even Chinese-specific.

Each blog entry begins with a short "psytopic.com" summary followed by long source citations from news & BBS articles.

Rough translation of excerpt from post, "What kind of psychological phenomenon is "Super Girl" fandom?"

"To approach the Super Girl phenomenon from a psychological perspective: everyone becomes emotionally involved by identifying with the hopes and dreams of the participants. They experience an emotional rush in being able to collectively shape the next super star; they are drunk on the illusion that "if you get famous, it’s because of me." In a way, to say that someone is an avid fan of the Super Girls, is to say that he/she has subconsciously become a Super Girl."

Via PostShow.

less than 1% legal: Chinese digital music

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on May 29, 2006

in Virtual China

. 1 Comment

A HUGE part of virtual China, whether via large or small screen, is about digital music. A *great* recent article in the online newsletter Knowledge@Wharton breaks down some of the basics for us. Key excerpts (but really, just go read it):

Digital music can be
divided into online music and mobile music; each broadcasts,
respectively, through the Internet and a mobile telecommunications
network. Online music is downloaded from the Internet to computers or
digital music players. Mobile music mostly targets cell phone ring
tones and "color ring back tones" — music downloaded for listening
while a caller waits for a call to be picked up. Another type of mobile
music developed recently is cell phone music — downloaded wirelessly
and played through software preinstalled in the phones. It remains to
be seen if there is a market for this new type of mobile music because
it is still at a test stage.

The 2005 launches of digital music sites, including A8, Aigo Music,
Shangda’s EZ Pod, Top100.cn and Taile, marked the Internet music
publishing business’s first step in China.

China’s online music market has grown to between 10 billion and 20 billion yuan, and less than 1% of that is legal.

No more than 15 of China’s more than 7,000 online music sites are
legal, according to market researcher iResearch Consulting. Even among
the few legal sites, there are differences in their business models,
pricing strategies and how they split their revenues with their
partners. A8.com charges 0.5 yuan to 2 yuan to download a song and
offers a monthly plan for unlimited downloads for 20 yuan (15 yuan
during special promotional periods). Top100.cn charges 1 yuan, Aigo
0.99 yuan, and Taile 2 yuan to 5 yuan for a single track download.

Link (the site also has links to simplified and traditional Chinese versions of the article)
(via China Net Investor)

Bus Uncle: he swears, he points fingers and he’s under alot of pressure

Published

Jason Li

on May 28, 2006

in Meme

. 0 Comments

巴士阿叔, or Bus Uncle, has become the latest internet-video hit, according to ESWN, the HK Cable TV channel, the HK paper Apple Daily and 1.9 million Youtube viewers!

The video clip takes place on the 2nd floor of a public bus in Hong Kong.

20060528_busuncle1

The story involves a teenage boy who tells the man in front of him to speak more quietly into his cell phone. The provoked man, Bus Uncle himself, launches into a tirade about how he does not wish to be disturbed, how he’s under pressure and how he wishes to resolve the argument by a shake of hands. The teen tries to defend himself, albeit somewhat dispiritedly, but what could he have replied to Bus Uncle’s rant involving his "thing" and his mom.

Here’s a link to the subtitled Youtube video.

The video has spawned multiple remixes, including karaoke and dance remixes, as well as a Cafepress store.

20060528_busuncle

The Youtube video contains a standard pool of "wow", "weird" and that token conversation about the superiority of the United States (with both sides firing hard).

The video is in Cantonese, and the situation is very specific to Hong Kong: does that mean there is an elite/active Cantonese internet community of 1+ million around the world?

Additionally, the cameraman behind the video, Ah Jon, claims he has another 160 clips on his camera-phone. He’s currently courting bidders for these Reality TV style clips. Will video voyeurism become a new fad in Hong Kong?

I’m going to stay home.

Source: ESWN, Youtube

finding Chinese colleges

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on May 27, 2006

in Search

. 0 Comments

The categorization of search services in comparision with other
national/linguistic Internets, will continue to be one of the more interesting
developments in virtual China.

Baidu, China’s leading search engine, has launched one of those obvious-in-hindsight, badly needed services. Baidu College Search 百度大学搜索.

For instance, if you were interested in studying at the Chongqing University of Medical Sciences, you could find it (in Chinese) on the list and click through. Not to its URL, mind, but to a page that gives you the URL to cut and paste.

(via China Tech Stories)

Chinese Photographers Association official website

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on May 26, 2006

in Photos

. 2 Comments

Check out the works of some of China’s professional photographers to get a sense of how things look through a Chinese lens.

link to website
link to Fu Jianyong’s 傅建勇 lucid, northern b+w shots of manual laborers and their kids on constructions worksites and at rest (examples below)
link to Zeng Ziqiang’s 曾子强 soft edged, brightly colored portraits of kids, peasants, landscapes
link to Xu Baowei’s 徐保卫 winter scenes, almost the rural New England of China.

Chinese blogs can drive quick public action

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on May 26, 2006

in Blogs, Government, News, Photos and Virtual China

. 1 Comment

We all have our own ideas about what charity is and how to make it happen. Charity on the Chinese mainland takes place within the context of socialist class ideologies, Chinese Buddhism, newly resurrected pre-revolutionary civic structures, Chinese-style non-governmental organizations, and emerging Western-influenced philanthropy.

In the last few years, bloggers have also voiced social justice issues, such as the "BMW case" or the kitten crusher. I don’t know how common it is for bloggers to call attention to specific individuals, but such a story of blogger-driven charity — and the power of blog and BBS aggregator sites — unfolded on Chinese BBS and blog aggregator Daqi.com’s Outstanding Blogs page.

Li Guozhong, a Hunan professional photographer, was touring rural villages a few days ago with 3 colleagues when he was introduced to a dying 12 year girl with septicaemia, a potentially life-threatening infection in which large amounts of bacteria are present in the blood. Li snapped a few striking shots of her condition and posted them on Chinaphotocenter.com with an appeal to "save a dying 12 year old girl." According to Li’s post, the girl’s poor rural family had only enough money for 10 days of treament at a local hospital in the fall of 2005. When this failed to cure the blood poisoning, the skin of her leg began to rot away — and somehow her shinbone broke through the rotting skin.

There the post and photos were seen by a Daqi blog editor. Within 2 hours he had a Daqi blog opened for Li Guozhong
and prominently placed on the main page for publicity. You can see the
photos and initial post here. The post and photos captured the hearts of readers and started bulleting around the portals and BBS’s. According to the account of reporter and Daqi executive Jiang Ziwei,

[The afternoon of May 25] we gave him the main page of Daqi. These
kinds of stories are not uncommon. I thought that was pretty much the
most we could do…at 11:40 pm I suddenly got an MSN message telling me
that Li Guozhong had just put up a new post saying that under the care
of a local municipal party committee and municipal government, the girl
had been saved!…I realized that in only 10 hours, the situation had
taken a turn for the better…In those 10 hours, who knows how many
people online and offline had run around taking care of this
situation. Everyone should now recognize the value of Daqi Outstanding
Blogs insisting on bloggers using their real names.

In a case where the state has so clearly failed its rural citizens, the voice of an individual
blogger brought light and heat and very quickly, some kind of resolution.

Link to Li Guozhong’s post on going back to the village with municipal party and government officials.

Another “Virtual China” !?

Published

Jason Li

on May 25, 2006

in Art

. 0 Comments

Li Zhenhua (李振华) recently organized an exhibition at the Walker Art Center (in Minneapolis) called "Virtual China." The aim of the exhibit was to bring out the new face of the Chinese city. To do so, he enlisted the aid of fellow artists as well as fellow netizens, who were encouraged to email him pictures from their everyday lives. By uploading and downloading media to and from a physical space (the exhibition space in Minneapolis), Zhenhua hopes to challenge the dichotomous concepts of virtual and real.

The exhibition came in three parts: The Wave, a collection of videos.